It is known to deposit a layer on at least part of the surface of a substrate by bringing said surface into contact with a liquid phase generally containing one or more compounds in suspension or dissolved in a solvent, or a sol-gel phase. This contact may be made by coating the substrate with a liquid phase, or submerging the substrate in a liquid phase, or even by passing the substrate under a liquid-phase curtain. The layer is then formed by evaporating the solvent from the surface of the substrate, this evaporation possibly being followed by one or more treatments of the layer being formed, such as a heat treatment, in order to react/convert/harden the compounds or at least superficially modify the layer being formed, and thus obtain a layer with the desired composition and properties. Spin coating and dip coating are two known examples of this type of technique.
It will be understood that, with this type of deposition technique, control of the thickness, uniformity and, more generally, the quality of the layer, is difficult because it depends on many parameters. Specifically, especially when it is chosen to submerge the substrate in a solution, the thickness of the final layer obtained depends on the speed with which the substrate is withdrawn from the solution; however, controlling the various parameters of this type of deposition (speed at which the substrate is withdrawn from the solution, temperature conditions, etc.) is not always enough to completely controt the properties of the layer.
A process for depositing a layer on a substrate is known from document WO 93/11079, in which the step of submerging the substrate takes place in a first enclosure and the step of evaporating the solvent from the surface of the substrate takes place in a second enclosure, the two enclosures being separated by a wall and an isolating element. In this way, the evaporation of the solvent is carried out in an atmosphere that is isolated from the solution, the solution remaining in the first enclosure.
However, it is necessary to move the substrate from one enclosure to another, through the isolating element, thereby tending to impede or alter drying of the layer.